TheAudientVoid

"The approach taken by Chomsky and Marr toward understanding how our minds achieve what they do is as different as can be from behaviorism. The emphasis here is on the internal structure of the system that enables it to perform a task, rather than on external association between past behavior of the system and the environment. The goal is to dig into the 'black box' that drives the system and describe its inner workings, much like how a computer scientist would explain how a cleverly designed piece of software works and how it can be executed on a desktop computer."

The article completely misunderstands what Behaviorism actually is. Once again, the misunderstanding comes from confusing the Methodological Behavoirism advocated by John Watson, Edward Thorndike and others, who did indeed try to model people as a "black box", with Skinner's Radical Behavoirism, which denies that there's even a box to be opened; rather, Skinner holds that there is only a locus where a series of environmental processes happen to converge and interact in interesting ways. Some of these processes are much older than the others, and are expressed in genes; others are relatively newer, and are learned. Skinner did not deny that genetics played a role in language acquisition, nor did he ever maintain people are born a blank slate. While Skinner found Chomsky's work regarding universal grammar unconvincing, he maintained that it was not, as Chomsky claimed, directly opposed to his own work -- the two theories were orthogonal, and would succeed or fail independently of each other.